A journey in words...

Welcome to my journey in words! A story about health, exercise, weight loss, food addiction, humor, size discrimination, sarcasm, social commentary and all the rest that’s rattling around inside my head...

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Monday, May 18, 2015

Air Conditioning: A Rant

I live on the wrong continent.

I say this because I have been told that there are places in Europe
that don’t automatically refrigerate every indoor space the moment the
temperature outside goes above 70◦F.

When I was a kid, summers were hot and they were supposed to be
hot. We liked it that way. At night, the windows were open and there
would be a fan stuck in at least one of them, humming away with a comforting
summer tune and circulating balmy air through our darkened bedrooms. During the day we wore shorts, drank water,
went swimming, sat in the shade, and ran through sprinklers. I was never cold.

It was heaven.

It was only after I moved out on my own at the age of 24 that I first
experienced life with an air conditioner, and even then it was only in my
bedroom so that my poorly ventilated second story room got enough air in it on
the hottest of summer nights.

It’s May now, so I have to carry a coat all the time. When I go indoors I put it on, when I come
back out I take it off, wincing at the instant headaches that having to cycle repeatedly
through warm, then frigid, then warm, then frigid environments cause.

I work in an office building, so I bundle up in layers of sweaters all
summer long. I sit at my desk shivering,
often working with gloves on, gritting my teeth over the money being flushed
away in an endeavor to make me as uncomfortable as possible. When I leave work at the end of the day I
breathe out a long sigh of relief upon walking into the parking lot and getting
to feel the sun for the first time. I
get into a car that’s been sitting enclosed in the sun all day and actually
revel for a few seconds in the feeling of intense warmth before rolling the
windows down.

Look, I’m not advocating sweltering to death if someone is elderly or
infirm. I know that people die every
summer because of excess heat and poor ventilation and I don’t want that to get
worse. But would it really kill
corporations to cut the budget by building office windows that OPEN and
allowing fresh air and fan ventilation on spring and fall days?

Do we really need to run air conditioners on full blast inside
hermetically sealed buildings in April?
In March?! It’s making us all
soft; unable to use or even recognize the natural ways our bodies have of
regulating fluctuations in temperature.